Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: life

  • Talking about It Generation

    Dear Reader,

    The Roman orator and senator Cicero warned anyone defying one’s age is asking for trouble from the law of nature. I have no intention to falsify my date of birth in legal documents or to make a pact with the devil to keep me from being an old hag. Instead, I want to address the vagaries of getting old and the travesty of maturity that has become all the more conspicuous as time passes. It is a life to tell, and I am addressing the voice from the heart with a spirit of undying youth at the center of the heart to you, my readers, young and old, across the oceans and lands. Thus begins my soliloquy.

    They say we are all young at heart with willing spirits, but the weak flesh. While truth is truth to the end of reckoning, the reality of life forces you to realize that you are getting old and older as you find yourselves surrounded by people who are decades younger, the race of the new generation -especially the MZ Generation. Gone are the Second World War generation with the departures of Queen Elizabeth and her better half, Prince Phillip, Tina Turner, Jane Birkin, etc. The Korean War Generation has become a thing of the past, along with the former, replaced by the Vietnam War Generation. Here’s the Reality Bites Moment. The MZ Generation born in the 2000s has taken over the workforce, equipped with digital savviness and adorned with Social Media. 

    For instance, where I work is filled with the MZs, and they take such a shining pride in being of such a high-tech era, dwarfing all those born before them. I wallow in their endless chatting and overtly hyped self-promotion. To them, anyone over the evolutionary scale of 30 years old is, needless to say, “Old” and therefore not worth being associated with. To them, we – yes, I am one of them – are invisible and ignorable unless you pretend to be someone you are not so that you can be jovial with them. What a tragedy!

    Looking back, the years of work since I graduated from college at the beginning of this century – Geronimo! – I see the working environment then and now and realize the world has changed a great deal in terms of the way people think and behave. Until 2015, people still had the cultural traits of the analog times when writing journals with pens was more prevalent than typing into iPads, laptops, or iPhones. I could find people I could talk to effortlessly, and they would also speak to me about a common topic back then. But now, it is a different world because it is filled with the neotypes of humanoids. It’s like being marooned on a planet surrounded by cone-headed aliens or besieged by hideous Its in Backrooms. 

    Have you ever seen the movie Logan’s World? It’s the world of Youth and Beauty where anyone over 30 is being put into a spectacle death under the pretext of being “renewed.” Renewed because the presence of the Old becomes purged by

    the company of the New Army of Beautiful Youth. I look at the world around me and see the images from Logan’s World, which dissolve into one another and shape the Leviathan of the MZ Generation. I know now how Hamlet felt when he uttered thus with the skull of the dead jester: “Alas Poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio!” Ditto to that, Hamlet.

  • prompt 29

    Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

    Dear Readers,

    There are many things I wish I had done but aborted by the yoke of life or through the vertigo of existential distress. I had to smother my true spirit under the duties and responsibilities of an elderly child of an immigrant family struggling to make a living in a land of people who do not like me very much. But I will say it anyhow in my blog because I am asked by today’s prompt to which I am willingly obliged.

    I wish I could have become more articulate in expressing myself in writing and speaking so that people could understand why I am the way I am and that they could be my friends, as many people seem to achieve the art of expression without effort. That would have changed my life in a brilliantly green way to happiness because if you can’t articulate yourself effectively, it is like being socially and mentally awkward, and people will ignore you and leave you alone, even if you hate being lonely. What a tragedy.

    I wish I could have realized that worrying will get you nowhere because it will derail you from the tranquility of the mind with multiple faces of a fool. That life is livable, even if it is unlikable sometimes or many times is what I wish to realize someday. To that effect, being serious every time will trap me inside the existential backrooms with a point of no return. I wish I could look back on the foot steps I have treaded upon in my life and say with a smile thus: “My goodness, was I too serious for nothing?”

    I still have a life that I haven’t forsaken, and I want to give it another try to make it as beautiful as possible. The words of St. Teresa of Avila could not have sounded more soothing and curing than any other time than this time: “Let nothing frighten you, let nothing disturb you. All these will fade away.” I hope to see the world around me as workable and achievable, and most of all, adorable in its own oddly enchanting way, which I hope to utter someday, “Oh, LOL! Was I too serious back them?” Why not? Wishes and hopes are free.

  • Prompt 28

    What personality trait in people raises a red flag with you?

    Hello there,

    So, I am finally back to my blog after a long suspension of the magical practice of writing. Blame the daily duty of earning bread outside the home, but most of it was a low level of will to write. Thus, I was happy to see today’s prompt topic that caught my immediate attention and galvanized my vapid spirit to put pen to paper.

    When I see people who ingratiate themselves with those in power or popularity, I am disgusted with the preponderance of the absurdity of humanity. The sight lays bare the Darwinian law of the Survival of the Fittest, the Victory of the Strongest at the expense of the Weakest Link. William Golding must have kept such unpleasant human characteristics in mind when writing Lord of the Flies. And I see the tribes of the id-driven adult children (or incalcitrant adolescents) ubiquitously, especially at work. They curry the favor of those who are outwardly meritorious and dominantly overpowering. And if you are out of their clique, you are invisible and ignorable. It doesn’t matter your depth of erudition is unfathomably deeper than theirs, for seeing is believing. It’s a tribal mentality still and always practiced across the strata of class, race, and gender. And I can always see it, but I can’t do about it.

    Be it ever so pessimistic, it is the most displeasing sight of the rudely annoying red herrings in the body of humans. They remind me of Yahoos from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Aristotle said human beings can’t live alone, and it’s true, but that doesn’t mean I have to supress my innate dislike of such ugly trait and accomodate my nature to the animalistic practice. Joan of Arc, Thomas More, and Socrates were never part of those syncopants.

  • Prompt 27

    What motivates you?

    Motivations are instant energizers that galvanize me to do things I highly wish but least actualize. They come from within and outside, but more often from the in-between of the consciousness and sub-consciousness of my mental realm, where the Muses perambulate around from their regular offices.

    Grand and pompous, though it may sound, motivations are of quite a common stock. For instance, I am motivated by good feedback on my work performance, whether for monetary purposes or personal interest. I am also highly motivated by the books that are relatable to me. Furthermore, I am strongly motivated by the stories of those who pull through despite the weakness of characters to whom I can relate because it gives me relief that my problems are not unique and that I am not flawed; thus, I can hope that the wishes are fathers to the actions.

    When motivated, I am highly delightfully productive with a high level of invincible confidence from within. Nothing frightens me, and nothing stops me. I am like a runway fashion model who swans around in a garb of confidence on the figure of art. Why would you want an illegal substance when all you need is a small dose of motivation that keeps you in high spirit?

  • Letters of Note: Cats by Shaun Usher

    Letters of Note: Cats is an adoringly compiled individual narrative about their cats in an epistolary form by famous people, ranging from Nikola Testa, the Romanian prodigy of the electrical invention, to the unforgettable actress of the 20th century Elizabeth Taylor, and so on whose affection for their feline babies is universally communicable across time and space.

    Of all those words from the hearts, Elizabeth Taylor’s letter to her dear cat, who went missing after being moved to a new Californian home from their Welsh home, profoundly touches my heart. Those loves, those memories, those longings all flow from artless words written in tears and project how much she misses her flurry child without florid elaboration. Her cat is not just a “pet” but a “companion” who has seen her in the saddest moment under the darkest sky without make-up. Reading her letter, I felt like I knew the actress personally, as she shared her insecurity without such a dear friend who used to stay by her side. How would I live without my two cats by my side? I would have written a similar letter to Toro and Camille.

    The creator of this lovely anthology of letters, Shaun Usher, never seems to cease his creativity, zeal, and humanity after his first publication of Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience in 2013, resulting in a decade-long successful Letters series. I have seen musicians exhausted with their creative flairs for making new albums, either by adhering to their prior hit album music style or morphing into a different avant-garde-styled musical experiment, but not Shaun Usher, whose fountain of creativity is welled from faith in humaneness universal in all humankind. It is not to lionize or canonize Usher for the Letters series, nor to idolize him mindlessly in the heat of instant adulation as a gullible reader, whom Edgar Allen Poe might have frowned upon, but as a reader of the unique third eye that can see a writer’s true colors. So, if you love cats with hearts and like to read and write letters – okay, I will also include emails for MZ generation readers – reading Letters of Cats will be a pleasure.

  • Prompt 24

    What are the most important things needed to live a good life?

    The three most important things for a good life are made of these: good stable employment, love of self, and a sense of humor. As we are both social and individual beings, the aforesaid are the essence of happiness in life that would provide me with a sense of security and a healthy environment in which I can find my inner potential creative power without worrying about the ills of reality.

    While money isn’t everything, anyone must sustain a livelihood, such as clothing, food, and housing. Without it, the deprivation of material necessity will impede a creative, lively spirit’s yearning and opportunity to express under the burden of life. Which will also lead to a despaire of oneself. IT is not to say that only those with secure jobs are self-confident, but it is also challenging to maintain a level of confidence when you are down and out, moving from one job to another, like a wandering nomad. True that even a panhandler can be content with himself, but then it must be he transacendes the ways of this world, completely detached from the needs of this world into his own earthly nirvana. Lastly but not leastly, a sense of humor is a handmaid to goodness that will change a heaven hell and a hell heaven. At the moement of despair, any humorous dialogue or scene from a comedy movie or a funny moment of life will moementarily take off the clouds of disappointment or depression.

    You and I deserve happiness and the good life because we are such starstuff as dreams are made of, harvesting sunlight from the heavens excellently brilliant. I hope my reader will have good lives because we are worth it.